Surface Book Tip: Fix the Context Menus

While Microsoft bills Surface Book as the ultimate laptop, its detachable screen makes it a 2-in-1, and as such Windows 10 configures certain UI elements for multi-touch and pen. But if you really are going to use Surface Book as a laptop, one of these changes, in particular, can be quite annoying: When you right-click, the context menu that pops-up displays to the left of the mouse cursor instead of to the right.

To be clear, this is by design. And if you are going to be using Surface Pen a lot—and are right-handed—you may want to simply leave it as-is.

But many people will simply use Surface Book as a laptop, I bet. And if you aren’t going to use Surface Pen, you may find the default behavior of context menus to be annoying, as I do.

To change it, you can use a legacy user interface called Tablet PC Settings, which is most easily found with Start search. In the Other tab of this window, you will see an option for Handedness. By default, it’s set to right-handed, which causes menus to pop-up on the left.

Or, you can use the new Settings interface: Navigate to Devices, Pen.

Either way, if you change this setting to left-handed, however, context menus now pop-up on the right. You know, as God intended.